I would like this poem
to be a machine.
Concise, metallic,
a counting apparatus.
A means to keep each moment
contained and fixed, akin
to a series of Polaroids,
photographed and fixed
to cardboard or some other
paper-panel backing.

Photographs of photographs and Polaroids
of stacks of books on fragments
and photographs and pamphlets
on letters sent and imminent
collisions. What the body does not know
it wants. And the mind.

A California of snow and the surprise
Of illness. I throned myself in the white
Noise of its silence and watched as the world

Sunlight sang through the chick door's crack.
   And I heard her words,
         yet chose not to wake my brother,

The skeleton clicks, endlessly doubling
over in my hands. Damned things that steal soul
and flee. Mine, the son of a virgin father

For hours now the Last Supper has been over.
And the beating almost over, and morning's cry
Yet to be heard by the workmen in the courtyard

Once it seemed possible, those boys
Peeking out of gun slits at the German line
Or on graves detail, wet, miserable,

Father’s books lying on the living-room floor
Must be divided into threes: art history,
Classical letters, and, left from my days here,

We offer each other a dark
brew. But we must drink.
A seduction is the setting up

So bondage is a big part of it, after all—
that old art of rendering a lover submissive:
a tactic, a strategy. Denying somebody’s body